In the following description, “reporting” is hereinafter used to refer to the communication of reports or statements between persons of the same organization, and, in particular, the communication of regular or routine statements. The reporting can be done in numerous ways:                ascending or descending (relative to a hierarchy of decision levels),        hierarchical or functional, oriented by “cost center” or profit center”,        individual, collective, or “circulating”,        periodic (from daily to annual), or at the occurrence of the particular events,        more or less formalized.        
A part of the reporting involves quantitative elements that can be produced in an automatic manner by an information system: costs, values, durations, trends, various indicators coming from ERP software (acronym of “Enterprise Resource Planning” for the planning of enterprise resources), CRM (acronym of “Consumer Relation Management” for management of the client relation), and other functional help tools for the organization. But most important is the reporting exchanged between two persons (or groups of persons), such that they can communicate in a regular manner in the context of their respective roles. It is spoken here of descriptions of facts, problems, requests, intentions, interpretations of numerical data . . . etc, of all qualitative information which is necessary for the functioning of the human organization, and which in the end comprises expression and explanation.
Reporting is thus a significant function of any organization. This function, however, in the current state of the art, is both costly and poorly equipped, though it has benefited from bureaucratic provisions and electronic mail.
The technical problems that the present invention intends to solve involve the speed of the generation and supply of reporting information, on the one hand, and the quality and readability of the information transmitted between persons, on the other hand.
A report is costly to produce, in particular, because the editor spends a lot of time on the tasks of presentation, sorting, and page layout, instead of on the expression of content, and this regardless of the tool used. This increased cost for formatting slows the preparation and transmission of reports and thus impairs the speed of monitoring of the organization. This increased cost can also lead the editor to sacrifice content, simply because the editor devotes himself for a time, consciously or not, to this routine task. The quality of the information is thus affected.
The readability of these reports is a second technical problem that the present invention intends to resolve. In fact, even if the editor takes great care in the presentation of his report (to the detriment of the monitoring speed), this presentation often has need to be revised by the addressee depending on his own context, software and/or equipment (e-mail, printing driver, different page formats in the United States and in Europe, for example) from his choices or reading habits and from his own need to make a report of his activity, for himself or for others who, for their part will have to revise this report for their own needs.
The addressee of a report often has preferences on the presentation of information: in which order, with which level of detail, and according to which conventions they must be presented. But there is no practical way to encourage or facilitate the use of these standards by the issuers, apart from the implementation of a specific tool (text model or form), a costly and often ineffective solution because it is too rigid.
When these standards are defined, it is rare that they coincide with the ones that the issuer would naturally use. The points of view are different. For example, a worker would design his activity report in a sequential manner (according to the list of processed tasks), while his manager would want to see grouped on the one hand, the main results, and on the other hand, the points requiring his intervention. In this case, regardless of the quality of the applied standards, one of the two will be restricted, and constrained by a “translation” force.
The readability and usability of the reports are thus limited in the current state of the art.
The present invention intends to correct these disadvantages.